The Family *roll

We will miss Chicago. But there are certain aspects of big city life we will not miss. Traffic for one. And general incivility. Case in point: last night Ellie was far more fussy than usual. I took her out of her bouncer to walk her around the apartment (in nothing but my boxers — this will become relevant, I promise you). While standing in the living room, I watched as the 60-something owner of the bar around the corner from us on Irving Park drove his SUV (an SUV — you know something bad is going to happen) into one of the three empty parking spaces in front of our house, where we have posted official (i.e. from the city) “No Parking — Moving” signs. The signs don’t kick in until this morning at 8am (it says so on the sign) when the truck is meant to arrive (yes, I’m blogging 12 minutes before the truck arrives), so I didn’t bat an eye. Until, that is, the guy got out of his car, walked over to the sign closest to him, ripped it off and threw it in the gutter. What the fu…oh, sorry Hanna, I mean: What the frak?

Now, this guy wasn’t counting on the owner of the signs standing at his window watching the whole thing go down. I flew out the front door in my boxers, a swaddled Ellie in arms, to confront the guy. “Did you just rip our sign down? Why would you do that? We’re moving in the morning? Why did you do that?” He completely ignored me, although he did say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about” as he turned the corner to head south on Wolcott. I ran inside, through the apartment, to our back door which opens out on the Wolcott (still will Ellie in my arms) and continued with my penetrating questions, “Won’t you answer me? Why did you do that? That’s a really crappy thing to do. I’ll call the cops if it’s still there in the morning,” to which he replied, “Go ahead, call the cops. Call them now.”

At this point, Emily was up and wired so we retrieved the sign, put on clothes (in that order) and went to the bar, still with Ellie in my arms, to continue the, um, conversation. There was no one in the bar (there never is) other than the bartender, so it was just the four of us. In short, he acknowledged ripping down the sign. He said that we have no right to take up the “entire block” because we’re moving. Exaggeration did nothing for him here. We’re literally taking up the space of a large moving truck — about four spots — and surely if we don’t have the right to do that, we do have the right to put up “No Parking” signs by way of courteously informing our neighbors that we’re moving and, gee, it would be swell if you could cut us some slack. As Em said to him, rather effectively, “We would do the same for you,” after I had said, “We’re your neighbors.”
But here’s the thing: we do have the right to reserve those parking spots. The posters were issued by the city and they do not say, “As a courtesy to your neighbors, please do not park here as they are moving.” They say “No Parking — Moving (date/time).” We hammered that point home too. The result: “I’ll move my car. Don’t make such a big deal of it.” We more or less left it at that, although Emily made a point of telling him that it was a big deal and that he had behaved terribly. He moved his car about 20 minutes later (we were standing in the living room), but maybe only because he got the sense that if he didn’t, my last act at 1851 W. Cuyler would have been to drag a key across his door. Asshole (sorry Hanna, there’s just no other word for it).

We’ll have some pictures of the move soon enough.